Obama: Last of the "New Democrats"? (Salon)

Our times demand visionary leadership. The moderate progressivism of Clinton and Obama isn't up to the task

“I am a New Democrat,” Barack Obama told the New Democrat Coalition back in March 2009. Whether he wins a second term or is defeated, the first black president of the United States may be not only the second but also the last of the New Democrats in the White House.

Between the 1980s and the present, the so-called New Democrats have existed in two distinct forms. In the early 1980s, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was formed, chiefly by white Southern and Western Democratic politicians, with the goal of winning back “Reagan Democrats” — white working-class members of the dying Roosevelt coalition, who combined support for universal social programs like Social Security and Medicare with hawkish military attitudes and socially conservative values on attitudes like abortion, censorship and gay rights. Early in its history, the DLC proposed a program of educational and other benefits for young Americans in return for national military or civilian service, along the lines of the G.I. Bill.

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As presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both reflected the priorities of the second New Democrat coalition, uniting donors from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley with a “new majority” coalition of racial minorities, immigrants, liberal women and young voters. Because Democratic voters are disproportionately poor, this has produced a Democratic Party that, in economic terms, is an hourglass coalition of the top and the bottom. Economic populism frightens the party’s billionaire donors, while social populism, which has often been associated with white working-class xenophobia, racism and religiosity, frightens blacks, Latinos, immigrants and white social liberals. The result is what Mike Konczal and others have called “pity-charity” liberalism — a kind of liberalism that appeals to the sympathy of the rich for the poor, rather than appealing, as the New Deal did, to solidarity among the middling majority. It was a version of progressivism ill-suited to the Great Recession, which demanded the visionary leadership of a Franklin Roosevelt, not the managerial competence of a Nelson Rockefeller.

10. I agree.

Some time ago I came to the conclusion that this is what happens, time and time again through history - we get to choose the abyss or a renewal. Possibly the only thing we can do now is to help ensure that we go FDR instead of Hitler.

21. Please please please????

22. Reagan Democrats

that's like military intelligence .
Mort Saul ( when he was cool) used to draw a circle showing how the extreme left were right next to the extreme right ,30 years later the center got pushed to the right .
Now how do we get the center back to center ? I'll still be way left of center as some here will be centrist but our bearings will be true.